The Path of Colour by Adam Kalinowski is a temporary art installation that sets in motion tactile stimuli. Its distinctive and simultaneously interactive material consists of approximately 20 tons of coloured aggregate ranging from 0.2 mm to 5 mm. The title refers not only to the emerging composition of colour but also to the transition arising between two elongated chromatic compositions filled with coloured aggregate and placed on the pavement. As viewers traverse this granular terrain barefoot, they become both observers and creators. The varied densities of sand, the vibrating chromatic palette, and the unpredictable patterns unfolding beneath their feet cause the work to evolve through each interaction. Its ultimate form does not reside in physical space but rather in the memory and imagination of the participants.
From an artistic perspective, these works temporarily reconfigure the social dynamics of public space. The everyday spectacle of urban life typically conforms to what Erving Goffman termed the “presentation of self”, i.e. a theatrical choreography sustained by social masks and behavioural conventions. Public art, particularly in its interactive manifestations, helps suspend these roles, creating a space for more genuine and spontaneous human encounters.
In this context, the coloured aggregates can function as catalysts of social creativity. Their use in large-scale compositions transforms them into a medium for collective expression. Regardless of age, background, or intention, the participants are drawn into a shared, playful process of creating form and meaning. The very process fosters the emergence of a temporary community, united not by ideology but by a shared moment of sensory and physical engagement.
The ultimate value of such projects lies in their capacity to disrupt routine, awaken dormant senses, and reintroduce imagination into the public sphere. Through entropy, colour, and touch, they restore the possibility of openness, both within physical space and in human relations.
Adam Kalinowski’s art is rooted in a fascination with matter in a state of motion, transformation, and mutual interaction. Working with coloured aggregate, i.e. particles of sand and minerals of varying gradations and hues, he creates works that have neither a single centre nor a predetermined structure.
It is precisely this variability, i.e. the fundamental instability of form and colour, that leads the artist to conceive of his art in terms of entropy. Entropy, not only as the physical law of disintegration but as a creative principle, allows him to perceive beauty in irregularity, in randomness, and in the absence of a fixed pattern. Instead of superimposed order, Kalinowski proposes an order that emerges from relationships obtaining between particles, between human beings and matter, between the work and its environment.
In this sense, entropy becomes an aesthetics of variability, an enabler of the experience of beauty in the ephemeral, dispersed, and uncertain. Colour here is not a superficial property but a phenomenon of depth, difference, and adjacency. Each grain of sand contributes its own shade and its own presence, and their collective composition does not make up a uniform mass but a dynamic structure in which the pattern continually eludes fixation.
These works may be described as rituals of ephemerality in that they are beautiful, yet impermanent. Their essence lies in continuous coming to being; they do not strive toward finalization. It is an aesthetics grounded in the acceptance of change, transformation, and dispersion, in which entropy is consciously induced, until the moment when Kalinowski arbitrarily decides to stop it to come up with a specific artistic model.
project website – Color Path
